This blog is a place for wives, girlfriends, significant others, and anyone else stuck to a chef to come together and chirp to each other about how to deal with the nonsense that goes along with being the wife of a chef. I was struggling to live with a ghost of a husband who I never saw until I met two other chefs' wives that saved me. It was then that I realized there must be more who need love and support too, right?
Hilary Battes, First Lady Desperate Chefs'Wives
On Twitter @HilaryBattes

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Monday, July 27, 2009

Matter of Knife and Death

No tool is as useful and necessary to the chef as his knife. Before Erik was a chef I knew nothing about knives. And now, well, I still know next to nothing but I'm certainly more aware of the styles, purposes, and different types of steels used. I also know they cost a lot, but thank goodness for tax write-offs. And because of the durability of the knives, Erik doesn't need to buy a new one that often. I'd say he splurges on a new knife every 4 or 5 years, but when he does I hold my breath at the final cost. These knives are made of all kinds of crazy steel and then gone through some crazy process to make them hard as rocks so they don't come cheap. Last week Erik headed over to his favorite knife store: Korin. Chef or not, this store is worth a visit. They have the most beautiful and unique knives as well as tableware, cookbooks, and sushi bar items.

He came out with a 240 millimeter Suisin Damascus Ginsan-Ko Gyutou with and ebony and silver handle, engraved with his name, a sharpening stone, and these awesome Japanese scrubbers called Sandclean, for cleaning pots and pans. I tried them on the caked on grease on my stainless steal pots and they are spotless! And I didn't even use any cleaning products. It kind of looks like a crazy sea creature and it feels like sandpaper, but it works great!

I seemed to get sidetracked with the scrubbers, but the knives just don't excite me like they do for Erik.

I gave my chef for his birthday last year 2 Kasumis, and I inherited his "old" Globals. They are officially his babies now and it will be hard to top the present this year... how do you top the knives that are the key to his career, that he uses every single day?

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ChefWife, The Simple Definition

chef wife- (noun) a woman in a relationship with- although not necessarily married to- a chef. Usually has two careers, her own and of course that of her chef. Understands terms such as: “doubles”, “PX”, “covers”, and “purveyors”. Doesn’t understand but deals with concepts like: dinner at 2am, chefs that smell like onions and fish, Christmas (and every other holiday) alone, callused hands, and mac and cheese dinners at home, and the always prevalent conceited attitude. After all, aren’t they kind of a big deal?